Published May 2, 2024 | Version v1
Journal article

Entanglement degradation in causal diamonds

  • 1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94117-1080, USA
  • 2. Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada
  • 3. Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77024-5005, USA

Description

Entanglement degradation appears to be a generic prediction in relativistic quantum information whenever horizons restrict access to a region of spacetime. This property has been previously explored in connection with the Unruh effect, where a bipartite entangled system composed of an inertial observer (Alice) and a uniformly accelerated observer (Rob) was studied, with entanglement degradation caused by the relative acceleration—and with equivalent results for the case when Alice is freely falling into a black hole and Rob experiences a constant proper acceleration as a stationary near-horizon observer. In this work, we show that a similar degradation also occurs in the case of an entangled system composed of an inertial observer (Alice) and a "diamond observer" (Dave) with a finite lifetime. The condition of a finite lifetime is equivalent to the restriction of Dave's access within a causal diamond. Specifically, if the system starts in a maximally entangled state, prepared from Alice's perspective, entanglement degradation is enforced by the presence of the diamond's causal horizons.

Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1103/PhysRevD.109.105003;
arXiv
arXiv:2402.10417;
Crossref Funder ID
10.13039/100000181; 10.13039/100000183; 10.13039/100008913;

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review D
Journal Volume
109
Journal Issue
10
Journal Page Range
20 pgs.
ISSN
1089-4918

Optional Information

Copyright
© 2024 American Physical Society
Contract/Grant/Project number
FA9550-21-1-0017; W911NF-23-1-0202
Notes
Record automatically processed
Funding organization
Air Force Office of Scientific Research; Army Research Office; University of San Francisco